The Future is Ebooks

Over on A New­bies Guide to Pub­lish­ing,  Joe Kon­rath argues against the notion of an ebook bub­ble. He quite rightly points out that a bub­ble sim­ply doesn’t make sense in this con­text. What’s clearly hap­pen­ing is that ebooks are grow­ing as paper books decline and any­one cry­ing bub­ble is prob­a­bly just look­ing for a way to deny that fact.

But that argu­ment sort of misses the point. Ebooks vs. paper books is just a for­mat war. And any­one who’s into com­put­ers must be used to those by now. The big­ger issues involve dis­tri­b­u­tion and pricing.

On The Tech­nium Kevin Kelly posits the 99 cent book. Some of which already exist as a result of Amazon’s Kin­dle pub­lish­ing plat­form. The key here is his math. Kelly comes to the same con­clu­sion I have, which is unless you’re a big name author you’ll make as much money per book sell­ing your ebook for 99 cents as you will sell­ing a paper back at mar­ket rates.

And if the ebook mar­ket con­tin­ues to grow as it has been, you’ll make more money sell­ing that ebook direct through Kin­dle rather than going through a pub­lisher. Good for read­ers cer­tainly and not nec­es­sar­ily bad for authors either. Though it may put even more empha­sis on marketing.

Now all I have to do is get off my rear and actu­ally start writ­ing that web series I’ve been work­ing on…

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2 thoughts on “The Future is Ebooks”

  1. Bob Mayer
    March 12, 2011 at 00:14

    Thanks for list­ing my blog. Every­one is argu­ing but num­bers aren’t some­thing that one can argue against. With my tra­di­tional pub­lisher, a $5.99 paper­back nets me .47. With my own pub­lish­ing, a .99 lead nets me .34. With the $2.99 fol­lows, I earn $2.09.

    Reply
    1. Eoghann
      March 12, 2011 at 01:11

      I think the rea­son there’s so much debate is it’s still dif­fi­cult to take those per book fig­ures and fore­cast per book money.

      I tend to think that a $0.99 price point could bring in enough sales to eclipse paper­back income, but that doesn’t fac­tor in pub­lisher advances. And how price sen­si­tive are con­sumers? What is the dif­fer­ence in sales between $0.99 and $2.99? But there are so many fac­tors involved, its hard to come up with a con­clu­sive answer.

      The more I look at it though, the harder it is to jus­tify the cur­rent pub­lisher model.

      Reply

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